Comedy with few surprises: Kevin Bishop, Kris Marshall and Xavier Samuel in A Few Less Men.
Photograph: Studio Canal

Greeted with a tsunami of bad reviews when it opened in January 2012, director Stephan Elliott’s riotous wedding-gone-wrong comedy A Few Best Men plays, at the peak of its bed-soiling powers, like an Australian version of The Hangover.

It’s the kind of film where a character suddenly finds themselves with a hand up a cross-dressing ram’s anus, a scene or two after smoking weed from a bong made out of an apple juice bottle.

A Few Best Men’s penchant for outrageous humour took a memorable real-life turn when, in the second week of its release, the producers bought an advertisement in the Age quoting one of the newspaper’s own reviewers. The critic had fumed that the film was “unreleasable.” As this blissfully gloating ad observed, its opening weekend attracted 125,000 people. Ticket sales generated $1.8m at the box office, marking the strongest debut of an Australian comedy in over a decade.

A massive hit, in other words – and perhaps a reminder that no genre is as subjective as comedy (for the record, David and Margaret were fond of it). It seems unlikely the sequel, A Few Less Men, will get any more love from reviewers or draw as big a crowd as its predecessor. But hey: a part of me hopes the reviews will be even harsher and the box office even greater, in the hope another one of those finger-pointing advertisements makes the rounds.

So, is this a movie for you? Perhaps that question can be rephrased: do you think a corpse with a boner is funny? If you answered “yes” or “maybe” – or thought for a few moments before arriving at “no” – there’s a chance A Few Less Men will hit the spot. The sequel retains screenwriter Dean Craig (Death at a Funeral) but passes the directorial baton to Mark Lamprell, who previously directed the Australian musical comedy Goddess and co-wrote George Miller’s criminally underrated Babe: Pig in the City.

The story begins minutes after the original concluded. The wedding that brought the now-married David (Xavier Samuel) and his best buddies Tom (Kris Marshall) and Graham (Kevin Bishop) to the Blue Mountains is done and dusted. But their mate Luke (James Helm) has done himself a mischief – as you do, after the speeches – by getting drunk and falling off a cliff.

A tumble from that height would surely result in death but the trio are gobsmacked to discover he landed safe and sound in a lake. Luke gets out of the water and exclaims “I must be the luckiest man alive!” as he walks towards them, then WHACK – a boulder drops on his head and kills him instantly.

This joke is not even slightly surprising: during the seconds leading up to the moment of impact you know something is going to take him out. The way the scene is set up, Luke’s line of dialogue hanging in the air with an ellipsis at the end of it, makes it obvious – if not the event itself but when it’s going to land (so to speak), which, for a gag all about timing, is more or less the same thing.

Shortly after David, Tom and Graham are given a moment alone to say goodbye to their friend. They notice the aforementioned angel lust (or “death erection”) and resolve to give Luke some dignity in death by getting rid of it. One of these blunderbusses then repeatedly whacks it with a big book and you know how this scene is going to end too: somebody will walk into the room and witness them attacking a dead man’s penis.

A Few Less Men is ‘more about ticking boxes than tickling the funny bone’.
Photograph: Studio Canal

That’s the core problem with A Few Less Men. Not Lamprell’s direction, which is sassy and lithe, or the principal players in the cast (I would happily give a second sequel a go if they were returned). It’s Craig’s screenplay, which underlines the you’re-supposed-to-laugh-here bits up to and including delivery, imbuing the film with an almost procedural quality: more about ticking boxes than tickling the funny bone.

As the trio fly en route to London with Luke’s boner corpse in tow, their plane (piloted by Jeremy Sims, who recently directed Last Cab to Darwin) crashes in remote Western Australia. This triggers a road movie-style set-up, the plot regularly reset to its same basic coordinates. The characters are occasionally harangued with phone calls from Luke’s bellowing, browned-off cousin Henry (Ryan Corr; great to see him hamming it up in a comedy role), whose hardcore gangsterism is amusingly belied by a dainty get-up – salmon sweater sleeves tied gracefully around his neck.

When a slow-witted truckie (Darren Gilshenan) agrees to give the boys a lift and tells them to put Luke’s coffin in the back of his truck, again the scene is set up in such a way that we know or at least suspect what’s going to happen: they’ll get the wrong vehicle. And when Shane Jacobson agrees to helps the group out but says hey, my mother would love to meet you first – anybody can guess there’s going to be something odd about her. The film’s poster, which depicts Jacobson in women’s dress, might be a clue.

A comedy with so few surprises tends to have limited appeal, though at least the cast are engaging and the production values are fine. Perhaps all can be forgiven if, like its similarly puerile predecessor, A Few Less Men defies expectations and becomes a smash hit. That would be the greatest surprise of all – with, I hope, a new critic-shaming advertisement to commemorate the occasion.

• A Few Less Men is released in Australian cinemas on Thursday 9 March